Mount & Blade

I'm sure by now no one is even checking this place anymore since it's been inactive for so long and I'm probably just presumed dead, but suffice to say that my life has been pretty hectic as of late and I haven't had enough time to properly formulate any new articles.  I still don't, so I've decided to throw caution to the wind and not bother properly formulating anything, which is why I'm dashing this out during my lunch break at work.  Enjoy.

TaleWorlds' action rpg/strategy/nobleman simulator Mount & Blade (and by extension, it's sequels "Warband" and "With Fire and Sword") always seemed like a pretty cool idea, and I'd heard a lot of positive hype surrounding it, so I took the plunge when it was on sale on Steam this weekend.  I must say, it's a really intriguingly ambitious project, but so far the execution has left a lot to be desired.  It's a free-form, open world game set in a more or less realistic medieval continent with a variety of warring kingdoms that you can work for and against.  For this article, I'm talking about Warband, the 2nd game in the series, which is by far the most popular and the only one I've played so far.

You begin with character creation, where you fill out a questionnaire about your background that decides things like social status, starting stats, and starting skills.  I like this method a lot, and generally praise games who can implement backstory-based character generation without making it a really contrived and transparent "And then I went to sword school.  To learn sword things." because it helps set up a greater degree of immersion and allows for a more roleplaying-y feel.  One problem with this in M&B is that you can set up chains of events that don't really make sense.  It's possible to go from "Son of a thief" to "Street urchin" to "Knight's Squire," which just seems a little sloppy to me.  All they had to do was come up with some other combat-oriented option to give you if you came from a really low beginning that would have the same mechanical effect but a different name.  Renaming it "Local Ruffian" or "Mercenary" or something would have taken 2 seconds and stopped it from breaking the very immersion they're striving to create.

Then you get to design your character's face using 4000 different sliders for chin length and eye socket depth and whatever.  Why does every game have to do this now?  I know that game designers mean well with this system, thinking that it gives you the maximum degree of freedom in designing your character's appearance, which is what people want.  They are incorrect.  Instead, it makes it next to impossible to make a character who doesn't look like they have some serious genetic defect.  If they just gave you a variety of options for each trait (10 noses, 10 eye shapes, 10 mouth shapes, etc.) it would be so much easier to make characters who actually look like human beings and you would still have more than enough options to choose from.  Instead, every character I have in every game looks like some part of their anatomy has been attacked by hammer wielding apes.

Herpin' some derps.

Then it sets you loose in the realm.  The learning curve is quite steep, and there's really no explanation of what you can or should be doing, which is at once exciting and daunting.  You can travel around, meet companions, hire soldiers to fight in your company, and do quests, but there are a lot of other, more subtle things going on.  You can engage in courtship and try to marry into power, or just blow off all the kingdoms to raid villages and terrorize peasants.  You can even engage in market speculation and become a trade baron if you like to not swordfight in a game about swordfighting.  The kingdoms are constantly changing, sending troops to attack one another, forming alliances, and killing or capturing eachother's leaders, and you just kind of exist amidst the flow until you gain enough power to begin directing it.  I loved this kind of game when I was younger and had fewer responsibilities, and thus had more time to devote to them.  The idea of a huge, dynamic world full of tons of possibilities to explore and discover is awesome.  But at the same time, I find these games more and more overwhelming, and frequently find myself without the time or energy to devote to learning their many intricacies.  I was nearly paralyzed by New Vegas at first for this same reason, and M&B has an even greater degree of complexity.

As the name would suggest, Mount & Blade is a game largely focused on mounted combat.  When a battle starts, you and the rest of your troops all charge onto the battlefield, usually a large distance from the enemy.  This allows you to set up different tactical formations before the fighting starts, and use the terrain to your advantage.  Once the hacking begins, you can attack with different kinds of swings depending on how you move the mouse as you click, which all require different guard positions to block.  Your foes do likewise, and so, as in actual swordfighting, the trick becomes reading their movements to block correctly and making your own moves difficult to predict.  This sounds awesome, and in some ways it is, but the actual mechanic for using it feels a little clunky and counterintuitive. For one, when you move the mouse to decide your swing or block, it moves the camera as well, making fighting really disorienting.  For another, it's pretty hard to actually connect with anything when on horseback (fighting dismounted is more dangerous, but you also hit what you aim at a lot more often), and blocking is entirely hopeless.  This could well be my own lack of experience with the game or general ineptitude speaking, but in the middle of a huge melee I find it more or less impossible to actually plan strikes and feints while attempting to determine where the 5 guys surrounding me are going to be swinging from.

^ My character in every battle ever

Multiplayer is apparently where it's at in Warband, and I don't feel like I'm capable enough in a fight yet to even consider embarrassing myself on the internet yet, but I'm a little disappointed to discover that there's no campaign coop.  The multiplayer is just skirmishes, yet the completely open ended design of the campaign almost demands a multiplayer function.  Even if it was just having other PCs in your party all roving together as part of the same company, that would be hella fun.  And if you were each running your own warband, either working together or apart, well, that's what the game feels like it was designed for.

You can download a demo of Warband here.